Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 20 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: The Law of Creativity
— From The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success by Brian Tracy.
The Law of Creativity states that “Every advance in human life begins with an idea in the mind of a single person.”
“Ideas are the key to the future,” says author Brian Tracy in The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success. “It is the ideas you generate, more than anything else, that will enable you to solve your problems, overcome your obstacles, and achieve your goals.”
Take a look around you: your clothing, the furniture, the appliances, the products and services that you use… every single one of those things was an idea in somebody’s mind before becoming a reality. And the beauty of this law is that it doesn’t stop there. Tracy adds four corollaries to this Law that make it so much better, stronger, and much more powerful:
1st corollary: Your ability to generate constructive ideas is, to all intents and purposes, unlimited. Therefore your potential is unlimited as well. Tracy explains this beautifully: “Ideas are a mode of transportation, a vehicle that you can use to take yourself from wherever you are to wherever you want to go. Your job is to generate as many ideas as possible, evaluate them carefully against your current goals, and then take action on them.” Two things to remember here: (1) there is no such thing as a shortage of ideas and, (2) as Seth Godin says, “you can’t have good ideas unless you’re willing to generate a lot of bad ones.”
2nd corollary: Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve. –Napoleon Hill. “Your mind is designed in such a way that you cannot have an idea on the one hand without also having the ability to bring that idea into reality on the other. […] The only question you have to answer is, how badly do you want it?”
3rd corollary: Imagination rules the world. – Napoleon Bonaparte. “Our entire man-made world is the result of thought brought into reality.” As Bill Burnett and Dave Evans so aptly put it in their book Designing Your Life, “Everything that surrounds us was designed by someone. And every design started with a problem.” And before there was design, there was the idea of that design in the person’s mind; it was the idea of how to solve a problem or how to make something better. A lot of things come to fruition because someone wants to scratch his/her own itch and the solution is successful enough to be shared.
4th corollary: Imagination is more important than facts. – Albert Einstein. “An idea or an insight at a critical moment can be the turning point in your life. All great changes in human life and destiny begin with an idea that enables you to see things differently and to take an action that you would not have taken in the absence of that idea.”
ACTION
TODAY: Tracy suggests practicing the “Mindstorming” method of idea generation for any and all problems. Here’s how it works:
- At the top of a sheet of paper, write down any goal or problem you have in the form of a question. Then, write 20 answers to the question. Your answers must be in the present tense as if you are doing them already.
- Pick at least one idea or answer from your list of 20, and take action on it immediately. This will ensure the creativity and ideas keep flowing all day long and, the more ideas have, the greater the opportunity to find the one(s) that work best to solve your problem or attain your goal.
FUTURE: “Do this mindstorming exercise every day for a week, first thing in the morning, for whatever question or goal is most important to you at the moment,” says Tracy. “You will be amazed at the quantity and quality of ideas that spring from your imagination when you ask yourself the right questions and then write down the answers.”
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